"Don Quixote", fully titled "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha", is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. It follows the adventures of a nameless hidalgo (at the end of Part II given the name Alonso Quixano) who reads so many chivalric novels that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood. Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is, and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story. The story implements various themes, such as intertextuality, realism, metatheatre, and literary representation.

Published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published. It has had major influence on the literary community, as evidenced by direct references in Alexandre Dumas' "The Three Musketeers" and Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", as well as the word 'quixotic'.

Miguel de Cervantes said that the first chapters are taken from "The Archive of La Mancha" and the rest translated from the Arabic from the Moorish author Cid Hamet Ben Engeli. This metafictional trick appears to be designed to give a greater credibility to the text, by implying that Don Quixote is a real character and that the story truly occurred several decades back. Yet it is obvious to the reader that such a thing is impossible, because the presence of Cide Hamete would have caused numerous temporal anomalies. It was a common method at the time because of the disapproval the novel genre was subject to at that time.